Experimentation night and a very messy workflow
First, I had to get rid of the previous pattern, it started to make me sick.
That’s a voronoi pattern + some bands deformed with a noise texture + the space warp thingy, which is more or less a noise texture but more detailed
Second I used CC0 corals from sketchfab, they’re amazing. It took a lot of fiddling, I tried with bones, shells, etc.
I used this and this
I stumbled on a cool shell, and I added it to the scene to make some organic spikes
I thought of the forest spirit of princess Mononoke and wanted some of that feeling here too, so there we go, emission stuff, electric blue as it should. I’ve also been super impressed by the work of @orencloud (wouldn’t there attempting the remix of his splash though) and wanted to use more of the repeating patterns and light sources.
I have done 3 things:
- I used the pointiness input for the shell, so only the tip of the spikes would light up
- The rose thorns are still properly oriented, so I could use the Z generated coordinate to light up only the tip
- I’ve used a distorted voronoi pattern on the horns. I did not want them to fully light up, they would imbalance the composition. I’m still not sure about the pattern though, it seems a little cheap to me
I gave the horns a shader I have used previously on corals, originally for this piece
I have used the teeth of my favourite skeleton. I like that it has teeth, yet they’re not too aggressive.
I gave the teeth my procedural bone shader, with a lipstick color, gotta to be pretty… The teeth could be cleaner though…
I also gave a slight emission shader to some of the “bumps” of the skin to make it stand out in the dark even more.
And finally I used GScatter form Grasswald to see if a little vegetation on top would do.
This thing wants to be a forest spirit type of thing, it tells me…
I’m trying to get the overall feeling right before diving into further detailed modeling.
I made a to do list, and it looks… long. I’m keeping it for myself.
Finally, I have used an HDRI studio lighting from polyhaven. I have the forest environment form Blender by default, but I really started lacking readability here. The studio lighting really helps defining the volumes better with harsh shadows.
Forest lighting (quite flat):
Studio lighting - I think it’s easier to figure out what you’re looking at - you’ll be excused if you still don’t know too well…
Final note, I sort of like the pattern, it reminds me vaguely of the crazy spaceships of Chris Foss for Jodorowsky’s never-to-be Dune
